Q14 - Superintendent: Within the school district overall

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Participating in a work internship lowers the chance of a student dropping out.

Evidence: 11% of high schoold students drop out, overall. But only 1% of those who do work internships drop out.

Answer Anticipation:
Here's a classic correlation -> causation argument. Because the students in the internships have a lower rate of dropping out, the author assumes that BEING in the internship CAUSES them to have a lower rate of dropping out. It's possible that something more like Reverse Causality is happening (maybe having good enough grades that they're unlikely to drop out is what qualifies them for the internship). Maybe some Third Factor is really causing both things (having ambition and a strong work ethic is causing these students both to not drop out and to take on a work internship). We want some expression of the idea that the author is interpreting this statistic to mean one type of causal story when other possible causal explanations exist.

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) There's no such thing as this flaw. If an author referred to her own subjective experience or opinion, sure. But I've never seen this show up on LSAT.

(B) This is a Famous Flaw named Equivocation (or Shifting Meanings). Student was used consistently.

(C) There's no Premise to Conclusion move that goes from "Since this one student had an internship and didn't drop out, NO students with internships will ever drop out."

(D) YES, this expresses the flaw. The conclusion does indeed offer a specific causal relationship (internship -> lowered chances of dropping out), but we could explain the evidence in other ways.

(E) This is the Famous Flaw known as Circular Reasoning (when the conclusion restates a premise), but that did not happen.

Takeaway/Pattern: Another LSAT classic. The evidence is just statistical (correlative). The conclusion is causal ("decreases"). When we move from one to the other with certainty, we're usually failing consider other possible explanations for the evidence.

#officialexplanation